Honestly, theoretically, size of the pool has no bearing on what you get in the long run, it should even out. Pools with more people/power will find BTC more often, but have to split it amongst more people whereas smaller pools won't find BTC as often, but they payout when you do find them is larger.

Say, say for example you joined a pool with your 300 MH/sec that was 3 GH/sec with 10 people all putting in 300 MH/sec (yes, I know it's simplistic, but it's easier to explain it that way.) When the pool finds a block, all 10 of you split it and you'll get 5 BTC.

Now say you join a pool that has 20 people at 300 MH/sec, so you're processing at 6 GH/sec total. You'll likely find coins with your pool twice as fast as the original pool, but you'll get half as many coins each go around.

So, simply put, in the long run, it should even out regardless of the size of the pool. So the key is to check out all the pools and see which ones you like based on fees and 'services' they offer (things like Longpolling, etc), rather than on the size/power of the pool.

In a very large pool, deepbit for example. every time you receive an LP notification, you run the risk on submitting a share that same second. I've seen multiple times, my miners submitting shares the same second (or 1 sec before or after) as an LP announce. That results in a rejected share and a higher stale rate.

In a very large pool, deepbit for example. every time you receive an LP notification, you run the risk on submitting a share that same second. I've seen multiple times, my miners submitting shares the same second (or 1 sec before or after) as an LP announce. That results in a rejected share and a higher stale rate.

In a very large pool, deepbit for example. every time you receive an LP notification, you run the risk on submitting a share that same second. I've seen multiple times, my miners submitting shares the same second (or 1 sec before or after) as an LP announce. That results in a rejected share and a higher stale rate.

You get a notification every someone in the total Bitcoin network solves a block, so you'll get the same number of notifications no matter what the size of the pool is.

But it doesn't really matter, because as soon as they do find another block, everyone learns about it.

Deepbit may actually have a slight advantage if a block is solved by both Deepbit and a small pool at almost the same time. There is a fairly large chance that Deepbit will solve the next block as well, and if it does it will probably include the block solved by itself and not the one from the small pool in the chain, because that is the one it knew of first. The fact that Deepbit hardly ever gets invalid blocks may be evidence of this.